Critical thinking about digital sovereignity

On February 10, 2025, we organized a session from the professional organization KNVI on critical thinking, with specific attention to digital sovereignty. The reason was the book we wrote about critical thinking about digitalization. Digital sovereignty is a topic that is currently topical and therefore an interesting case. To what extent do we still want to use digital facilities that are offered by tech giants or non-European countries? In this blog I describe a number of issues that came up in the discussion, and that may also be interesting for other people.
A first important point of discussion was what exactly the term digital sovereignty means. The core is that it is about being able to choose which digital resources you use to prevent unwanted dependencies. An important consideration here is that if there is a dependency on a certain digital facility, the owner can decide to disable it and you will therefore no longer have access to that facility. That is unacceptable for things that can be considered basic facilities. Leaders could, in an extreme case, disable all our access to things that are in the public cloud. Especially when individuals have this kind of power, that is completely unacceptable. In addition, there is a strong relationship with privacy; if you place your data on an infrastructure that you have no control over, your data can possibly be used by others for unwanted purposes. Incidentally, that also has a strong relationship with the term data sovereignty, which is about being able to determine where your data is, who may receive your data and what they may use that data for. An important insight is that digital sovereignty has a strong relationship with a number of important moral values. We mentioned privacy, but digital sovereignty is also very close to the value of autonomy. The first places more emphasis on what states or political entities want and the second is more general in nature. In addition, it has a relationship with security; it protects you to a certain extent against cyber attacks and espionage by other countries. Digital sovereignty fits less well with innovation; that mainly requires cooperation and therefore also dependencies on other parties. On the other hand, cooperation in Europe is important. It is an illusion to think that we as the Netherlands can be digitally sovereign; we should strive for that as Europe.
Learning from complex adaptive systems
Sovereignty also has a strong relationship with resilience and resilience. That is the ability to adapt to difficult situations and recover from setbacks. We can learn from the world of complex adaptive systems. These are systems that are not predictable and have natural properties to deal with setbacks. Examples of complex adaptive systems can be found in nature, for example, but people and organizations can also be seen as complex adaptive systems. These types of systems explicitly contain elements that are unpredictable and are given a chance to determine the future of the system. As a result, they can spontaneously start to show new (emergent) behavior. They also contain a form of overcapacity and redundancy, which means that errors can be limited to a small part of the system. They also have feedback mechanisms that allow them to learn and correct themselves.
If we relate that to digital sovereignty, we should embrace redundancy. We should also avoid dependencies on central components as much as possible. A federated architecture, in which all components have a shared responsibility, fits much better with digital sovereignty. Open source can also be seen as a way to deal with digital sovereignty. There is no single player who decides. In a more general sense, digital sovereignty is a lot about sourcing; from whom do you acquire resources? Principles about how to organize open source are therefore very interesting. Digital sovereignty requires a different governance structure. A structure in which central parties are avoided as much as possible. An example of this is blockchain. Information that you put on the blockchain is also automatically redundantly present. This also has a strong relationship with principles about how to deal with scarce common resources (commons). Our previous State Secretary for Digitalization explicitly drew attention to the importance of digital community goods in a letter to parliament. Research shows that if you apply certain design principles, communities can function sustainably, without central coordination. A key insight from the session as a whole was that participants saw how valuable h